Tag: gman

Gman just keeps getting better and better. For this year’s contest, Gman entered the wonderful world of clamshell design. The only thing that rivals its beauty is its features, so let’s get into it!

Gman used a handful of custom PCBs last year, but this year he went all out. Just about everything that could be mounted on a custom board is, and the controller is no exception. The above board’s primary feature is a custom PS2 controller emulator dubbed “PS2+”. Designed from the ground up by Gman, along with Matthew and Dave, PS2+ is still in development right now. Once finalized, it will change PS2 portablizing as we know it. This board also features controls for screen settings through the PS2 controller, an audio amp that switches between the built in speakers and headphone seamlessly, indicators for the current battery life, as well as FFC connectors that go to Nintendo Switch joysticks.

Something has to be controlling that battery indicator though, and that something is another PS2 game changer that Gman has been developing – PowerS2. PowerS2 has many features, including full voltage regulation for everything the portable needs, battery protection and regulation, single port charge and play, an on/off button, and the ability to autoboot the PS2. The battery indicator is very smart, and has an RGB LED that cycles through different modes depending on what the user wants and the status of the battery. It’s a pretty slick system overall.

A classic insane Gman trim.

The final internals, organized and tidy as always. But wait, is that a Raspberry Pi? Is the PS2 Razor just being emulated by a Raspberry Pi, or is the Pi being used to run games through Ethernet, in order to avoid the brutal load times that come when trying to run games off of a USB stick? I suppose it’s the latter, but we’ll be keeping an eye on this portable.

It doesn’t get much better than this, at least until Gman builds his next masterpiece. Until then, enjoy looking through his worklog and finished thread for more awesome pictures and details.

The PS2 has been seeing a lot of love from Gman for the past couple years, driving his many Wiis to sadness by their seemingly second class treatment. With Gman no longer transforming the beat up, second hand consoles into glorious portables, did their existence have any meaning? All hope seemed lost when the PS2 Razor was released in its stunning clamshell glory (article coming soon), but then suddenly Gman pushed out another beautiful Wii portable. The case is based on Gman’s contest winning GS2 and has been revamped to fit a GameCube layout and the internals of a Wii portable. To put it clearly, the G-Wii is an elegant portable that retains the simplicity of portables past.

This portable boasts several features that makes it stand out among other portables. All of the controls on the front face are from an original GameCube controller, including the two joysticks; this feature has become increasingly uncommon in handhelds, as portablizers have moved to using 3DS and Joy-Con joysticks in order to conserve space in their portables. Additionally, as seen in the image above, Gman’s portable also features 480p video output, thanks to the assistance of Aurelio’s Wii VGA patches.

The top of the portable features 3D printed L, R, and Z buttons, alongside an easy to comprehend power switch, a USB port, start and Wiimote sync buttons, and most interestingly, a GameCube memory card port. One of the only (if not the only) trimmed Wii portables to have this particular feature, it allows the user to seamlessly use their old saves from a childhood GameCube without having to mess with various homebrew applications to transfer their saves to a USB drive.

The back of the portable is fairly simple, an elegant fan vent and countersunk screws to keep the portable’s polished look.

And of course, you can’t have a Gman portable without beautiful internals. There are no custom PCBs to speak of, other than one for controlling audio opposite the GC+ in the front half. The simplicity of the build is really awesome; it shows that even in a community where custom PCBs are becoming more and more common (even inside of first and second portables), elegant builds can still be done without specialized circuits. Gman recognized this, and made the decision to open source his CAD files, allowing others to build their own G-Wii. This portable is a very reasonable challenge for beginning portablizers, who can find the files here. There is plenty of space to work with, and the final product is a beautiful, stable portable (assuming it is done correctly).

Once again, another amazing job by Gman. Portablizing is a great hobby in that there is no perfect portable. As Gman continues to push the boundaries of portablizing, stay tuned to see what other masterpieces he cranks out in the near future.

BitBuilt is proud to announce that the PS2 trimming guide is on the forums and ready to be used! A small team of amazing members have been hard at work this year creating compendiums, taking pictures, testing cuts, and building experimental portables to verify the possibility of trimming PS2 motherboards to more manageable sizes. Gman (formerly known as Wiiman) headed up the efforts and released two different trimming guides: a guide for a standard trim, and a guide for a more advanced trim. The standard trim is a bit wider than the advanced, but both trims are smaller than a standard DVD, which could make for some pretty small portables…

The summer building contest just finished up, and Gman took home the gold with his beautiful, top of the line PS2 portable. Sure, I guess it’s somewhat vain to name a project after yourself, but let’s just say he earned it.

BitBuilt is a community website built by the community, for the community. All pictures featured on the website have been copied with the consent of the original author, and or are taken by members of the website. All diagrams are for pure instructional use and are not monetized in any way.